How this site was made.

Bodoni Moda for the headlines, a high contrast serif standing in for the letterforms of the wordmark. Archivo for the small capitals that label everything: sheets, sections, buttons, the rail. EB Garamond for the reading.

All three are open typefaces, served from this site rather than a font network, in the Latin subset only. Together they weigh less than one photograph. Headlines run large and end in a period. Place names are set in small capitals, the way a printer would have done it.

Fourteen engraved plates came out of the original style reference, cut from a single sheet and keyed to sit on the paper. They are the whole vocabulary of pictures here. There is no icon set, and there never will be, because one flat icon next to an engraving ends the illusion.

The three larger scenes, the Maury County Courthouse, a pair of mules and a carriage, and the Athenaeum, were drawn from photographs of the real places and brought back into the same navy ink. The mule in the mark is the only mule that appears on purpose.

The cream is one color, everywhere, and it is never white. The grain is a single tile fixed to the window, so the page scrolls over it and the grain never moves. Every section sits in a double rule frame with gold corner marks, the way a plate sits on a page.

There are no shadows, no gradients, no blur. Depth comes from rules and paper. Gold is seasoning, kept under a tenth of what you see. And there is no dark mode. Paper is paper.

What does: the flags over the courthouse, the ears on the mule, the water in the Athenaeum fountain, and the sound coming off a bullhorn. Each is a small piece of the drawing cut out and redrawn many times a second, so the rest of the picture stays exactly still.

Everything else is quiet on purpose. The gold rules print in once when a page first opens and never again. Links draw their underline when you point at them. The marker on the rail tips its head when you reach the last sheet. If your device has asked for less motion, all of it stops.

The site is written in React and rendered to plain HTML when it is built, so every page arrives whole and reads the same to a person, a search engine, or an AI answer engine. It is served from Cloudflare's edge, close to wherever you are.

Every page is a numbered sheet, and the rail on the left counts them. Before anything ships, a script reads every built page for em dashes and exclamation points. There are none.

Copy, design, and code by Sticky Mule. Questions about any of it are welcome; ask on the contact page.